brings window-style app management to the iPad, allowing you to view multiple apps at the same time by resizing, going in and out of fullscreen, switching orientation, and rearranging them on your desktop at will.

I admire the technical skills of the author, but am dumbfounded at the commenters on the Verge piece and elsewhere clamouring for such functionality to be built into iOS. First, the Quasar system is pretty ugly, with chunky ‘Close’, ‘Full Screen’ and ‘Rotate’ buttons. With the assumption Apple would deal with aesthetics, there are still hardware considerations: some iPads have enough trouble running a single very advanced app, and would keel over if you had several running on-screen at once. But even if that problem was eradicated via a new A999 chip that somehow didn’t melt the device and your fingers, there’s the question of focus.

One of the greatest things about the iPad is that it forces you to concentrate on the task at hand—the device becomes whatever app you are using, with a few exceptions (such as background audio) and notifications (which can easily be disabled). Compare this to a PC or Mac running Windows or OS X. You get the flexibility to run umpteen apps simultaneously, but with that comes clutter and distraction. These days, I’m more productive on the Mac when I kill pretty much every app bar iTunes and a text editor. Now and again, I’ll fire up Safari, and I’ll periodically check email and Twitter. But this is how the iPad works by default.

A lot of people consider iOS to be some kind of retrograde step—a return to the bad old days of computing before we could run a whole bunch of apps at the same time. Me, I’m increasingly thinking the more ‘modern’ take of desktop computing was a mis-step. People aren’t programmed to cope well with multitasking; studies have shown that when we are distracted from a task it can then take tens of minutes to get fully back into the task at hand. To that end, any system that can help me concentrate and work better is a boon, not a hindrance, and so even if Apple went mental and allowed Quasar into the proper App Store, I’d still give it a miss.

5 comments on “Quasar windowed app system for iPad misses the point of focussed computing”

> One of the greatest things about the iPad is that it
> forces you to concentrate on the task at hand

I think this is a flawed argument. Running two windows side-by-side does not mean that you’re doing two tasks at the same time. It’s the computer that’s doing two tasks. You, on the other hand, could be writing a thesis in one window, while referring to a paper you’re quoting in another. Or you could be changing code in one window, while looking at the effects of your changeas in another. Or you could be writing a blog post in one window, while looking at the post you’re responding to in another. Or you could be writing an invoice in one window, while looking at a time-tracking spreadsheet of your work in another.

In fact, the *iPad* prevents me from concentrating on the task at hand, since it constantly forces me to jump between applications. iOS’s system is the one that always interrupts me with needless busywork, while the Mac’s is the one that allows me to focus on my task. As a result, I find it impossible to do any but the most basic work on my iPad. In fact, I still mostly use my iPad to watch movies, and to read Tap! Magazine and Retro Gamer

(And finally, the huge glut of iOS games means that it’s much easier for me to get distracted with fooling around on an iPad than on a Mac.)

Granted, the way windows work on desktop operating systems is broken, and Quasar is making the same mistakes. Getting windows set up properly is way too much work, and it’s much too easy to lose track of windows that are hidden behind other windows, and to generally make a huge mess. But that means that we should improve how windows are managed, not that we should kill the idea of looking at two things at the same time entirely.

Because computer multitasking and human multitasking are two very different things. You can single-task and still make very good use of your computer’s multitasking ability.

@LKM: Heh—I did wonder if you’d comment on this one. I agree with you in that one task might not only involve one app, and in that respect iOS can be (and, in your case, clearly is) limiting, and so: good point.

I do wonder what the solution is. On OS X, I increasingly find myself using Moom to shift apps to full-screen or to screen halves/quarters. I pretty much never manually drag/resize windows, and Quasar just seems horrible. Perhaps a 50/50 split on iOS would be workable in some circumstances, but the screen’s already quite small and that adds more pain for devs, in terms of UI design.

>I pretty much never manually drag/resize
> windows, and Quasar just seems horrible.

Agreed.

>Perhaps a 50/50 split on iOS would be
>workable in some circumstances, but
>the screen’s already quite small and
>that adds more pain for devs, in terms
>of UI design

Yes, that’s a problem. But generally, I think being able to see two windows at the same time solves 99% of all use cases, so it’s the way to go. Windows 8’s Metro UI allows for this, though I’m not completely happy with the UI.

If more people start to gravitate towards iPads as their main computers, I guess that Apple will do something similar at some point in the future. The fact that Apple focused on two specific screen sizes with the iPad and the iPhone is both awesome (since it allows devs to perfectly optimize their apps for each device, as opposed to, say, Android devs) and terrible (since it means that the apps don’t scale at all).

I have no clue what (if anything) Apple will do about this, but I’ll note that webOS does a pretty good job with scaling apps to different screen sizes without creating the bad UIs we see on Android. For example, depending on screen size, webOS can turn apps where your browse through hierarchies into apps where multiple hierarchies are shown at the same time (think Mail.app on iPad vs iPhone). More recent versions of Android might support this, as well, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Android app that works like this.

[…] No longer. A hack has finally come along that does it right.Brownlee has clearly lost it, take what Craig Grannell has to say for instance:I admire the technical skills of the author, but am dumbfounded at the commenters on the Verge […]

This idea of wanting our technology to constrain us — limit our options is interesting. You say you want that.
But clearly a lot of people are interested in the iPad form factor with less “forced focus”.

A famous architect designed a new wing for our local museum. He gave the steps on a central staircase an unnaturally short rise, in order to “disrupt people’s reflexive headlong rush to get to the next attraction”.
I.e: Artificial constraints, intended to “correct” our habitual choices.

Unfortunately, the unergonomic stairs just end up being annoying. Meant to make folks slow down and chill, they merely vex.

This is how many of us experience the “focus” of the iPad, when we’re used to our laptops.